My setup: Firefox 3.012
Adblock Plus 1.1
Win XP, user (not admin) account
Yesterday I visited a website and I got a popup message from Firefox to the effect that my computer was not protected and I should click “yes” to run virusscansitewhatever. I got suspicious, so instead of clicking on “yes” or “no”, I just killed Firefox with Process Explorer. That apparently may not have been enough.
Later I signed on to my admin account and I got a message that there was a Windows update. I downloaded it. When I finally went to turn off my PC, I got the message “installing updates 1 of 1” and there was the usual delay while it did that before automatically powering off.
Current symptoms:
All ads showing even though Adblock Plus is fully enabled. I uninstalled and reinstalled it and that made no difference. It did pick up my old preferences after the reinstall.
When starting Firefox, I now get the following messages twice:
There are no other copies running.
I went to add-ons/extensions and clicked the “find updates” button. One of my add-ons (I can’t remember if it was Google Redesigned or Better Greader) came up with an error message to the effect of “error occurred while finding an update for this extension”. I uninstalled both of them, but I still get the messages in #2, and another “find updates” scan showed no newer updates and no errors.
Ad Aware full scan and Spybot turned up nothing unusual.
I quickly skimmed about:config for all the data names including the string “extension”, and I didn’t see anything untoward.
I guess I could try a new Firefox profile and see what happens.
Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware is a great anti-spyware and is free (get the free version). I would just uninstall Firefox totally and if you have restore points go back to before then. Then reinstall the newest version of Firefox and download any add-ons to Firefox again. Download everything fresh.
I doubt you have malware. Sounds like you alt-f4’ing broke something in firefox.
No malware does this. WHy would it ask you to install anything, if its running as an app on your machine it would just install the malware and not ask you. Most likely this is a legitimate windows update. MS released a couple out of schedule recently.
Yes, there’s a new version of FF and your FF is set to update itself. This has nothing to do with windows update.
I would consider fully uninstalling it and reinstalling it before trying a new profile.
go to the firefox .exe in the Program Files directory and right click on it, select “Run as” and run it as administrator. Hopefully it will write the correct info into your profile then.
I started up my computer today and now Firefox is working fine. The error messages no longer appear and AdBlock is blocking ads again. Must’ve been gremlins.
